Intimate Distance (2 page)

At other tables most people have gone. For a place like Athens this must mean they've gone to a nightclub, to while away the hours until morning. We've been here only an hour and already we're drunk. We can't go home to his parents like this. I clap hands at the waiter to summon his attention.

‘Coffee,' I call to him. ‘Two, no sugar.'

A quiet settles over the café, a noisy quiet of stacking chairs and resinous rustling from the pines and the low mournful skids of cars. Then I realise the silence is in my head and it's driving me crazy. Still we sit opposite each other and don't talk. We sip coffee with concentration and look away over the water, black now, with no distinction between sky and waves. We don't know how to say goodbye, so we smile at each other with strained lips, and huge white seabirds startle us with foreign cries.

3

SYDNEY, SPRING 2017

AS I FINISH
my shower and hang damp towels on the verandah, far away over the rooftops comes the sound of wind chimes from someone's garden, voices in an unknown language. My water-tank is full, swelling with the unexpected downpour of last month, torrential rains that flooded the coast and broke the drought that's gone on for too many months. Though amid the rejoicing there were casualties, deaths, houses sinking under water.

I look out over the park – wild now with thigh-high grass – and watch a young couple keep to the narrow path under the Moreton Bay figs, heads bowed into each other. His voice is loud in the silence, her laughter diminished. I suppress a pang and go inside.

Zoi's in the spare room down the hall; no doubt still asleep since dawn, when he arrived off the plane from Athens. He'd been irritated, jumpy, when I met him with the car. My son was overnighting with a close friend of mine and we were alone. When I was seated in the driver's seat, I asked for the package and he handed it over without a word. I drove a little; my window was down, soon we were on the freeway. Then his voice, suddenly loud in the car.

‘Is that all you wanted, Mara?'

‘What? Oh, please. If you didn't want to do it, why come all this way?'

‘It was put to me as a bargain. Bring me the stuff then you can see your son. If he is my son.'

We drove back in silence. I kept the crinkly silver package of drugs wedged between my legs.

Now he's snoring on his back as he always did, arms folded, mouth wide open. He can sleep anywhere, even in Sydney, here in my house. Under any circumstances – unlike me. I can hear Pan talking in my mother's room, and I detect her voice above his lisping murmur, though she's not answering. She's mumbling some nonsense, and a clear word emerges here and there – yet she's been speaking less and less in the past few weeks. I've brought her back from the nursing home, with no real plans for her care. Now I feel as though I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth. It's getting harder to lift her, feed her, change her nappies. She resists eating; I have to force mush down her throat three times a day. It takes more than an hour each time. She's rigid and flailing when I wash her. I fear the homecare nurses who come regularly will force me to take her back. But I need her to die at home, otherwise I won't forgive myself. Well, I need her to die. There, I've said it. I need to help her die. And Zoi is my only hope.

Pan goes outside into the garden; the back screen-door whines as it's opened. I press my fingers to my eyelids to cool them, plunge myself into complete blackness. In my mother's room I lean forward over the bed and hug her, lifting her arms, dead weights, and placing them around my waist. Her mouth crushed against my ear, she murmurs something I don't understand. The skin of her neck and cheeks like muslin against mine; I press lightly against the fragility of her ribcage, her tender spine. I could snap her in two. I can still hear Pan's voice outside; it seems to carry so far in the early evening air. He's repeating an invocation of names in English and Greek: jasmine, lavender, jacaranda, wattle. I wonder how much of this he'll remember: when flowers have been replaced by survival gardens, with erosion and regret – and how much of his grandmother he'll cherish when she's gone.

At seven, after I've fed my mother, I open the packet. Inside the plain packaging are three vials of fast-acting liquid morphine, the barbiturate Nembutal and a large packet of sedatives. Zoi has brought them into the country with a prescription he's written himself, and a formal letter forged with a fellow Greek doctor's letterhead and signature. It claims that he has terminal cancer of the prostate, and that he requires the pain medication for his brief stay.

I tiptoe into the spare room. The setting sun has made a stripe of red across Zoi's face but he seems oblivious to the light. He's on his back, hands flung out over the sides of the narrow bed, mouth open. He's not wearing anything; I see his black nipples and furled penis where he's kicked off the sheets. I cover him. His eyelids are thin, inscribed with blood vessels close to the surface, hieroglyphs I can't decipher. Lashes gemmed with tears, from sleep or emotion, I can't say.

‘Zoi? Dinner's on the table. Want a shower?'

He opens his eyes. Watches my face in the dim light. I can feel he's at a loss to explain how I've changed. With a gesture so slow it's almost not happening he puts his left hand between my breasts, rests it there. I let him, and my shoulders relax.

‘Lie down with me. Just for a minute.'

I'm lying on the white bed. He brings his hand down to my legs, touches me, tentative.

‘I'm bleeding.'

He lifts my dress to my thighs, makes his careful way down my body, mouth open, eyes closed, as I lie immobile. I concentrate on the walls, cracked and discoloured in places, the tiny slit of a window where I can see the sky, lemon-pale on the edges of trees. I can't move, rendered motionless by his desire.

‘Pan?' he asks.

‘Outside.'

Pan's happy shrieks stab the air between us: excitement, yes, but also something akin to unease. The light twists and weaves and turns as day collapses into evening. The bloom of spring wearing away, flattened by hot winds.

‘Mara.'

The way he says my name, drawing out the first vowel and rolling the r, reminds me of how it was in Turkey. ‘Mara,' he would say, ‘Mara, my love.' My name would linger between us, a third person, a mirror image, the breath of flowers. I remember Efes: beneath the whiff of charred timber from old orchards, of peach and plum and pear-wood, was Zoi's cheap Turkish tobacco, his skin's sweat, the marine scent of semen growing cold on the sheets.

‘Don't, Zoi.'

‘What?'

‘Let's not. I'm sorry.'

He turns away in a rough movement and I'm presented with his back. Part of me is regretful, close to tears. I put out my hand to comfort him, stroke his shoulder. Yet another part of me reviews my actions, floating above these two figures on the bed: me in white and him naked, taking in every detail with a precise, calculating eye. There are three mosquito bites on his nape like kisses. As though he's here with us, I hear his brother say: You won't find anybody again who will love you as much as he does. Zoi still loves me too much. I caress his back; bury my face in it. He keeps very still.

4

EFES, WINTER 2012

ONE EVENING IN
the café Zoi told me he was going home. I looked away out the windows, past swift, moving people. He noticed my grim mouth.

‘It's not that bad. You'll come with me, of course. See Greece. Not that it's at its best. But that's what you came for in the first place, isn't it?'

‘I'm not sure about leaving yet. You know I planned to go to Istanbul – '

‘By yourself?'

He put his hand out to touch me.

‘Well, if I have to.'

My voice trailed off as he ran his hand up and down the inside of my arm. Up and down, to the rhythm of his words. The hairs on my arms electric.

‘We can go together, it's a cheap flight from Athens. Maybe I'll even come with you to Australia.'

I pulled my arm away, watched his hand come out of my sleeve like an act of magic.

It was late when we left the café. In the night markets we dodged battered Mercedes, gypsies in roving bands, beggars, men with one palm outstretched and the other covering their faces so nobody should witness their shame. Children, some with open wounds, others with stumps for legs and arms. I watched Zoi's face in the intermittent light, searching for some assertion of trust, some guarantee that life wasn't so bleak. His skin bleached white under the fluorescent lights. The rise and depth of his voice as he spoke about the way Greece used to be, his parents, the excitement of Athens, the amazing people, didn't make any sense to me. I felt the shape of his mouth against my ear, the warmth of his breath tinged with mint and
raki
. As he spoke, I watched the muscles in his cheeks move with the opening and closing of his jaw. He told me Athens hadn't changed that much: there were still pots of basil on grimy windowsills and glossy citrus trees on all the city streets and he laughed remembering childhood mornings before he knew me. I watched his tongue flickering between his teeth. He would pick a mandarin on the way to school and scratch the clean-skinned rind, its taste icy and dark, acid and sweet, sticking to his tongue, making him close his eyes. I watched him mime his pleasure, squinting tight. I looked away. His voice merged with the odour of cut gardenias, exhaust fumes, the sound of bells strung on the roof of a teahouse nearby.

AT THE PORT
of Piraeus we were greeted by a phalanx of relatives clutching wilted chrysanthemums. Heavy gifts, burdensome. Whisky. Foil-wrapped chocolates. Tall bottles of ouzo, in bags the shape of the Acropolis. Pecks on the cheek, pursed lips in the air, twisted smiles. Clucks of appreciation as though I were a little better looking than they expected. I was struck by their lack of tact, the baldness of their responses.

We were driven to Zoi's parents by an uncle, one of the many who thronged around us. Nameless faces with white moustaches and black shiny hair, large noses and wide mouths, slashes of laughter. Embracing the golden boy, insisting he sit in the front seat, exclaiming at how handsome he'd become.

We passed mandarin trees on the city streets and I leaned forward in my seat. All I could see was the back of Zoi's head, his hunched shoulder.

‘Look, Zoi, your trees.'

He merely nodded, looking elsewhere. We passed more streets, concrete apartment buildings, blackened shop fronts, burnt out cars. In Syntagma Square the façades of neoclassical buildings were made vivid by graffiti.
I am Greek and I'm not lazy. Merkel Out. We didn't deserve this. Unity Makes Power. We are all Greek. Fuck big business
. On one building, a beautifully rendered picture of hands clasped in prayer. Close by in the square were tangerines and twisted lemons, whitewashed halfway up each trunk. None bore any fruit. Zoi's childhood trees were sickly: grey leaves coated in dust and the fumes of cars, doing their best to survive in the city.

 

 

exile

 

We were glad then, certainly. A move then

Seemed somehow to be a move upward – something was always

happening:

and for all that we feared even then that it would be lost, we did not yet

know

the secret sally of the boat from the other side of the horizon

Persephone,
Yannis Ritsos

 

 

5

ATHENS, SUMMER 2013

IT'S TWILIGHT AT
nine o'clock. We sit at a table, which has spindly baroque legs covered in plastic, and we cough and smile, pretending politeness. The television swears to itself in the corner, whining about pay cuts and falling pensions.

‘Mara, this is your place here,' Zoi's mother says.

His father nods. He seems to be a man of few words, has hardly spoken since I arrived. I smile, not catching Zoi's mother's eye. Don't know what to call her, know Kiki is out of the question and decide Aunt is a neutral choice.

She serves and the men don't speak. They sit and contemplate her slow, fussy handling of the food, the handing of damask napkins, the heavy placing of bottles at each elbow. Generic cola, homebrew.

‘Mara?' Zoi indicates the others have already started eating.

I balance the crystal salad bowl with difficulty as it passes from hand to hand, each person careful not to take too much, not to appear too greedy. I decline olives, bread. Kiki smirks.

‘Your fiancée is very petite, then, Zoi? Or does she not like our food?'

A statement, not a question. She's used the word for betrothed. 
Aravonas
. The betrothal, or, in older times, the negotiation of chattels back and forth from house to house. Forging alliance through property, the passing of women from hand to hand.

I'm valiant. I force down cubes of brown meat, red sauce congeals on my plate. There are pots of flowers far below in the courtyard. Bold geraniums, sunflowers. A fig tree, before ripening. Huge elemental leaves, knobbly branches. I wish I were down there among the shadows cast by trees. I watch a young man, foreshortened, watering pots in the cool of the evening. He holds the hose down low on his body, indifferent, musing, and his movements make the round muscles in his forearms glisten and strain. I turn again to the conversation. Coffee in a small china cup. Liqueur-filled chocolates. Kiki places them in the exact centre of the tablecloth and this somehow disturbs me more than anything else.

I watch Zoi; he's alert to the open door, running from the table and embracing the young man who stands on the periphery of the room.

‘Look at you. Been working out?'

He feels his brother's muscles with open palms. Dimitri doesn't answer. He's surveying the table with puzzled, tired eyes, and he's the same young man who was watering the flowers. I rise from my chair and the tablecloth pulls a little with my sudden movement. I wonder why he didn't join in the welcome, the meal, why he's only just arrived. The way in which he holds Zoi, at arm's length, the veiled hostility. I look at him without smiling, answering his frank curiosity with my own. He shakes my hand, glancing almost imperceptibly at Zoi. When he's near me, I can smell the skin of his hands and neck: strong Greek tobacco, salt. He couldn't be more than twenty, youthful except for his tired eyes.